Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @04:23PM
from the good-luck-with-that dept.

Nate the greatest writes "Do you like to tweet or share links to interesting news articles? According to a coalition of Irish newspapers, that makes you a pirate. The National Newspapers of Ireland has adopted a new policy. Any website which links to one of the 15 NNI member newspapers will have to pay a minimum of 300 Euros, with the license fee going up if you post more links. Note that this is not a fee to post an excerpt or some punitive measure for the copying of an entire article. No, the NNI wants to charge for links alone. It's almost as if this organization has no idea how the web works. Or maybe they have found an elaborate way to commit suicide."

The notion is that the owner of the website would have to pay for such links... It would be up to the website to extract payment from its users... Which, in the case if one that permits anonymous comments, is not possible, and the website would assume liability.

Well, they can say what they like on their web site's terms and conditions [goreyguardian.ie], like:

"Hypertext links to this website by other users and websites are permitted provided that the link to this website is in a simple list of companies by pointing to Goreyguardian.ie's home page http://www.goreyguardian.ie./ [www.goreyguardian.ie] This limited licence entitles other users and websites to link to Goreyguardian.ie's home page only, and linking to other content on or information in this website is prohibited without Goreyguardian.ie's express written consent. "

It could be enforced by technical means, though. They could set up their servers to check the referer and whitelist only permitted referer domains. There are other, more complex schemes as well.

Of course, they'd prefer to sue and profit rather than preventing the "problem" in the first place. Hopefully there's something in Irish law that requires them to take reasonable steps to limit damages before suing (better yet, hopefully they just get laughed out of court).

I doubt it can be enforced anywhere. It's a policy made by a group of organizations, and has as much legal status as you and I deciding that ginger chicks have to flop their norks out if we whistle the first line of "Dixie".

I can't believe you posted this on Slashdot. You fell for it hook. line and sinker.
"Oh, please don't post links to our pages it improves our search engine ratings. Please don't throw me in the briar patch."

Hey, it's a real service to some of us webmasters. We can now add a little routine to our servers that scans everything send, looks for these URLs, and when it finds them, changes them to a random item from a list of URLs. For that list, we need someone to build a site that provides the URLs for things like rickrolls, goatses, etc., and keeps it up to date.

With the help of this little list, we can probably cut way down on their incoming traffic. But we need to pass the word to other webmasters, and bring as many sites into "compliance" as we can manage.

(It might also help if the owners of the sites on this list would send us lists of their main competitors, so we can make "relevant" redirections of the URLs that they don't want us to tell people about.)

Hey, it's a real service to some of us webmasters. We can now add a little routine to our servers that scans everything send, looks for these URLs, and when it finds them, changes them to a random item from a list of URLs.

Sure, while you're doing that I've already emailed the news-site admins a.htaccess that checks the HTTP-REFERER and redirects deep-links to the main page if the referring domain does't match. I mean, shit, we fixed this in the 90s to stop "hot-linking" or "bandwidth leaches". A lawsuit? For fuck's sake, that's clueless. It's either a ploy to get more links and increase their search ranking (guerrilla marketing), and/or their management are incompetent and didn't run this by the IT guys (or IT is sever

Why not post links? Its the best way to invoke the Streisand Effect [wikipedia.org] so that dog plus world can educate them on just how stupid their plan is. The sooner they get bitchslapped in court the better. The sooner they try to take someone to court the better. The farther they have to reach to take someone to court the better.

If they want a pay wall let them put up a pay wall instead of simply declaring one exists and threatening to charge money.

I didn't know there was an Irish edition of the Star, although I can hardly believe there is a UK one. How do rags like that keep going when their primary attraction (boobs) is available for free on the internet? Boobs are a commodity, it's not like theirs are somehow better than the internet ones.

The website for Women's Aid linked to stories on the newspaper's website mentioning Women's Aid, as if the news stories are some form of endorsement. Maybe that's what the newspapers are charging for. It is not the same like Google or blogs bringing visitors to the newspaper.

Is there some law that would force Google to pay? Otherwise, if they don't have an existing agreement, I would think they'd just file the bills in the circular filing cabinet under the desk. And maybe report them for some kind of fraud for sending out bogus bills?

Google does a lot of business in Ireland (mainly for morally-shady tax reasons) but why would they care about some newspapers there? Google doesn't normally advertise with the newspapers for some reason, and yet I suspect that the newspapers may well sell their online ads via Google.

Google won't want to pay, so Google won't post a link to their sites. Ever. Anywhere.

If there's no legal teeth, no agreement or contract, then Google will just ignore them. Setting a policy does not by itself mean anything if you can't get the people to whom you think that policy should apply to to agree to abide by it.

Otherwise I could easily use that same trick to my advantage: I have a policy that everyone on Slashdot that has a "q" in their username should pay me $500! So what if you think it's silly? It's a policy!!!!!

Its pretty trivial to make a dynamic website, for the sake of example, moronirishnewspaper.com and all the links on that are random numbers which are mapped to the the real story. Then every minute or whatever add new links and destroy the links that are more than 30 minutes old. So MIN.com/123456.html points to the most recent blarney competition, but in an hour, that URL will be deleted and/or repointed to goatse or whatever instead of the original story.

One amusing thing you can do, if you rotate every minute and keep the last 60 links around for an hour, is trivially analyze how long someone's been on the site and/or how long between clicks. You can also get all "top sekrit" security by obscurity and give different random number links to each subscriber, so if you see a link out in the wild, you know exactly who released it and when and what it was linked to. Other than that, it is a pretty moronic stunt or experiment. Why yes, I have done some pretty bizarre things solely for the F of it in the past 20 years.

I didn't mean that the link would necessarily work. (Take you to content). Just that the act of linking to a published http url on on the world wide web must be considered a legal act.

The name "World Wide Web" implies this. This was the fundamental intent of the core technology that has enabled the mainstream and worldwide use of the Internet.Either the web as a whole is illegal, or linking to whatever links are published must be legal. Anything else is not practically administrable, is prima face ridiculou

I think you're trying too hard. All you have to do is replace the site with a Flash applet. Or for extra awesomeness, use Java instead. Now the only functional hyperlinks will be to the main page that loads the applet, which will load their content cover page, and all article content is accessed there, within the applet. Plus since the content won't be searchable, the won't have to worry about Google and friends providing links directly to their site.

Yes that'll work. My insane link farm idea (from more than a decade ago) was sort of a psuedo MUD / text adventure on the net, with the idea that you decide if your instance is private, group, or public based on how you publicize "your" url or not. With the added metagame that instead of using sensible 128 bit hashes or whatever, I intentionally made the urls small and human enough that a devoted lunatic could randomly skip around and hit something once in a while, see whats going on. Needless to say, ne

Sorry i dont have a vertical bar to the left of the first letter but i dont know how to comment, too busy kissing stones.you might be smart, but the passive insults suggest your a fuckin loser

I believe that his use of "blarney" was meant as an insult directed at the drivel from an irish newspaper which has demonstrated that it's run by idiots and nincompoops. Unless you're one of them, which I doubt, I believe you are taking more offense from the statement than was intended. Lighten up!:-)

Billboards with advertising on one side, and a text like "look at the other side" on the back. These were condemned and possibly even forbidden for being considered an accident risk: many drivers would indeed try to look back to see what's written on the sign. And in the process of course not look at the road ahead.

Billboards with just a text like "coming soon" or "watch this space" caused quite a buzz, as many people

I was skeptical when I first read this submission so I did some digging around and found the National Newspapers of Ireland's submission to the Copyright Review Committee here [www.djei.ie]. I'm dumbfounded

The Consultation Paper, at page 48, briefly discusses the issue of linking and goes
on to provide for a proposed amendment to existing copyright legislation to
provide that the offering of a link on a page on the internet is not an infringement
of copyright law. The underlying rationale set out by the Consultation Paper in
this section is misconceived and we do not accept as being based on fact.

Section 6.3 of the Consultation Paper provides that Courts, (although it does not
specify which Courts) are increasingly concluding that a link, by itself, should
never be seen as a publication, reproduction or communication of the content to
which it refers, even where that content is an infringement of copyright. The NNI
takes serious exception to the statement included in the Consultation Paper that
“the fact that links make access to that content straightforward does not change
the reality that a link, by itself, is content neutral.” "

It is the view of NNI that a link to copyright material does constitute
infringement of copyright, and would be so found by the Courts.

The first two sentences seem aimed at things like The Pirate Bay and other sites linking to illegal copies, which they think should be illegal under some kind of contribution theory. And that you could at least argue, that there's a difference between pointing people to a legal gun shop and your illegal arms dealer friend Tony. Amending the law to say linking is never illegal would be a very strong result, if you're not hosting it you're not liable for it period. It would be very good for everyone casually linking to websites everywhere, but would would enable the business model of 1) Upload content anonymous to hosting sites, 2) Post links to said content on your ad-supported link site, 3) Profit from ad revenue. Not many "???" steps in that plan.

But the last sentence really takes it over the top, they assert the right to control all links pointing to their copyrighted work period and the "infringement" letters go with that definition too. It's like telling a map service that you made ad money on pointing people to our store, so you owe us money. To be illegal under copyright the, the law must be broken somehow because you can't have secondary infringement without a primary infringement. If I point people to your article, you can either choose to provide them a copy - which would be legal - or refuse them a copy - which would be legal. Under no circumstances could this lead to copyright law being violated as anything that happens once people follow the link is under full control of the copyright holder. Arguing otherwise is not just stupidity, but insanity.

The first two sentences seem aimed at things like The Pirate Bay and other sites linking to illegal copies, which they think should be illegal under some kind of contribution theory.

Seem so maybe, but I think it is not. It is far broader.

If there is a link to copyright material, that is not necessarily infringing. Lots of material that can be found on TPB is infringing, though the links as such are then not infringing. Remember: when you are dealing with copyright material, you are not necessarily infringing on those copyrights.

Most material published on a newspaper's web site is not infringing; they either produced it themselves or they have a license to redistribute. So reading it di

I decided, having had a couple of stiff ones (drinks) this evening, to drop them a line via the website in an attempt to contribute a tiny amount of sanity and/or education.

Unfortunately I was told my email could not contain anything other then [0-9|a-z] IN THE BODY and due to my use of punctuation I was not allowed to email them. I was going to "correct" my correspondence, but the I thought "fuck it, I've got work tomorrow", and I have a glass of wine and 2/3 of a frankly very good cigar to do in.

This is even worse than trying to claim that "you told John Smith where the infringing files are and therefore you are guilty of copyright infringement too." This is them saying "you told John Smith how to legally access our files (which we serve up), therefore you are guilty of copyright infringement." At least with the first example, there's primary infringement to base a claim of secondary infringement on. It's wrong, but there's at least a line of reasoning there. This is claiming secondary copyrigh

If I tell you that house on the corner of Main St. & Spring Ave is a crack house, did I break the law?

If I had just asked you where I can score some crack, then yes, and you could go down for trafficking.

Doubt it. Because unless you are cop (which would be entrapment, by you asking me), there would be no reason to connect me to the crack house. Just because I know it's there (just like the who neighborhood knows it's there) and I can tell someone it's there, doesn't mean shit, unless you find me there. I'm pretty sure some random crack head isn't going to say, oh, some dude told me where this way, you need to arrest him also. And even if he did, the cops wouldn't care. What they usually want in a pe

If they don't want people linking to them, the should set up an Apache Redirect Rule for all Get Requests that have a Foreign site as the Referrer.

Silencing free speech and expression with lawsuits when you can easily curtail that behavior on your own should be seen as unconscionable and any such lawsuit dismissed, with any fees associated in the defense against those claims rewarded to the defendant.

Are those newspapers going to pay €300 to each of the sites that they link to? Or do they think that they should be specially privileged and allowed to charge outrageously without ever needing to let someone do it back to them?

Given that their standard boilerplate appears to contain links to Facebook, Twitter, and Cullen Communications (their hosting service?) that could be rather expensive. 300 Euros times however many pages they have on their site should resolve the problem rather quickly, should those sites decide turnabout is fair play.